Disclosure: Vikings, Freemasons, Hooked X & the Knights Templar

The centerpiece of his revelations is that controversial, even contentious artifact known as the Kensington Rune Stone

For those who are unfamiliar with it, this is a 200-pound greywacke sandstone stele found by Swedish immigrant farmer, Olof Ohman, while clearing his land in the largely rural township of Solem, Douglas County, Minnesota, during September 1898. Lying face down and entwined in the roots of a stunted, 30-year-old aspen, the 30-by-16-by-six-inch slab was covered on its face and one side with some sort of runic writing. Ohman brought it to the nearest town, Kensington, where his find was displayed at the local bank.

A badly flawed copy of the inscription was forwarded to the University of Minnesota, where a translation was attempted by Olaus J. Breda. It would take more than another 100 years for scholars, correcting for the imperfect copy, to properly translate the text. The front face reads, “Eight Gotlanders and 22 Norwegians on (this) reclaiming/acquisition journey far west from Vinland. We had a camp by two (shelters?) one day’s journey north from this stone. We were fishing one day. After we came home we found 10 men red with blood and death. Ave Maria. Save from evil.”

Inscribed on the side of the stone are the words, “There are 10 men by the sea to look after our ships 14 days journey from this island. Year 1362.”

Accordingly, Wolter gives us the Kensington Rune Stone in the context of other, related finds. Among the best known is Rhode Island’s Newport Tower. Ordained by mainstream archeologists as nothing more than the ruin of an 17th-century mill supposedly owned by the family of none other than Benedict Arnold, Wolter instead demonstrates that the stone structure in Touro Park “was built using architecture that is not consistent with pre-Colonial construction practices before the first known recording in Benedict Arnold’s will in 1677 [this was an ancestor of the more famous Benedict Arnold].. . . Since the standard unit of measurement used in construction throughout New England in the 17th century was the English foot, the Newport Tower [which was laid out in the Norwegian short alen] was not built by 17th-century Colonists.”

MYSTERIOUS TOWER EXPLAINED

He cites dating procedures applied in 1997 to the structure by Danish professor Andre J. Bethune, whose carbon-14 analysis indicated that, in Bethune’s words, “the Newport Tower was standing in the years 1440 to 1480.” Wolter shows that its close resemblance to sacred buildings in medieval Europe and the Near East—such as Scotland’s mid-12th-century Eynhallow Church in Orkney or Jerusalem’s Templum Domini—defines the Newport Tower as a baptistery additionally employed for navigational purposes.

Wolter quotes a prominent researcher, the late James Whittall, who pointed out that “the tool marks created in the dressing out of the stonework (on the Newport Tower) can directly be related to tools before 1400. These marks are unique and unknown when compared to tool marks noted in Colonial stonework. . . . The single and double-splay windows have prototypes in medieval Europe and in the northern isles of Scotland in the 1300s in churches and the bishop’s palace in Orkney. . . . The walls were covered with a plaster stucco finish, both interior and exterior. Stucco finishing started in the 1200s and is a feature known in Orkney and Shetland. . . .There is no archeological parallel in Colonial New England for the Newport Tower and its specific architectural features.”

These and numerous other supporting details leave no doubt about the tower’s pre-Columbian provenance. Wolter goes to describe several other pieces of evidence for the medieval European impact on this continent, and for the presentation alone of these otherwise little-known artifacts, his book is especially valuable. To him, they are all fragments of an interrelating mosaic, the final image of which tends to reveal a post-Templar interest in North America.

Traces of this shadowy presence are scattered throughout a diverse collection of stone inscriptions and archeological sites from Minnesota’s Kensington Rune Stone to similar texts and engraved illustrations in New England.

June Goodhue says she’s known about the rock since she and her late husband moved to North Kingstown’s Pojac Point in 1952.

Sitting in shallow water, the 8-foot-long boulder sported unusual markings that were typically visible only at extreme low tide. Goodhue said she heard people say the markings might be ancient runic characters left by Viking or Nordic explorers.

Even so, Goodhue, who is now 89, says she didn’t give much thought to the significance of what people call the Narragansett Rune Stone or Quidnessett Rock. That is, until a week or so before Christmas 2011 when her neighbor Paul Roberti, a commissioner with the Public Utilities Commission, asked her to host a neighborhood meeting to talk about the boulder with Scott Wolter, a forensic geologist from Minnesota. Though Wolter has come under fire from critics who see his theories as over the edge, he is considered an expert by many on the subject of runestones, having produced documentaries for the History Channel and written two books. In “The Kensington Stone: Compelling New Evidence,” he writes about why he believes that a stone with runic lettering — found in 1899 by a farmer and his two sons on a hill in Minnesota — was not the hoax that critics claimed, but a real artifact made by visitors from Europe a century or two before Christopher Columbus set sail for the new world.

In the geologist’s view, the Narragansett Rune Stone was such an important piece of history — perhaps even more important than Plymouth Rock — that it was imperative that it be moved to a dry, safe place to protect it from erosion and vandals and to allow experts to examine it. Some participants at the meeting at Goodhue’s home in 2011 say that nearly everyone agreed — except for the neighbor whose property was closest to the stone, billionaire businessman Timothy Mellon.

Mellon, an heir to the Mellon family fortune, a founder of the Heritage Foundation and the CEO of Pan Am Systems, had, along with his wife, Patricia, bought two large parcels of land on the water’s edge in 2008 for $5.6 million. Mellon has been unavailable for comment.

Roberti, the public utilities commissioner, worked for 17 years in the attorney general’s office and has considerable expertise on federal and state jurisdiction over submerged lands. He says it’s easy to see why Mellon, who owns properties in other states, might have thought the rock belonged to him since in some states the property owner’s rights extend out into the water. In Rhode Island, however, the state owns the land below the median high tide, putting the rock under state jurisdiction.

In the spring of 2012, a pair of amateur archaeologists — Stephen DiMarzo Jr., of New Bedford, the Rhode Island chapter coordinator for the New England Antiquities Research Association, and his brother Peter DiMarzo of Newport — applied to the Coastal Resources Management Council for permission to move the rock to protect it and put it on public display.

Stephen DiMarzo, a former Teamster who delivered cupcakes for the Hostess Baking Co., said he first learned of the Narragansett Rune Stone in 2009 when he heard Wolter talking about it on the late-night talk radio show “Coast to Coast AM.” After talking with Wolter about the stone, the DiMarzos moved ahead with their application, though they found that getting state approval wasn’t easy. For one, Edward Sanderson, executive director of the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission, wanted to know where the stone would be relocated.